Bank hacking: power to the financial services makers

With the Maker Faire movement growing over the last few years, Hardware hacking has finally been making the headlines. It is one of the root causes of the recent startup hardware trends that are also fueled by platforms such as Kickstarter. What is interesting to me is that independent, smart and techno savy people put the same effort in building hacks around financial services to make them fit. It’s not always pretty, but it gives strong indication of where things could be going.

Hacking hardware. For people living in a card contactless environment, getting to one platform via mobile can’t happen soon enough. The solution? Cutting and soldering.

SimplyTapp appealed to an early segment of Android enthusiasts who abhorred having been told as to what functionality they are allowed to enable on their phones – by Google, Carriers or anyone else. And to any who dared to root an NFC phone (supported by CyanogenMod) and install the Cyanogenmod firmware, they were rewarded by being able to use both SimplyTapp as well as GoogleWallet to pay via NFC – the former where credentials were stored on the cloud and the latter – within the embedded SE.

Scrapping Personal Banking Data. Truth is, it’s not easy to acces your own banking data. Most of the bank websites have an average to bad UI, non-existing archiving functionalities (being upgraded to 9 months archive is considered amazing) and API access does not exist in 99% of the cases. If you want to automate movements between your bank accounts, get your bank account balanced pushed by email to you every morning then start by building your own scraper: https://github.com/tubaman/bankscrape . You can also find wrappers to access swedish banks: https://github.com/klr/bank and many more.

In my view the financial services industry should keep a close eye on the fringe of banking personal hacking. These are early signs and indicators of major trends and innovative services. Hacking challenges, idea crowdsourcing, clients on-boarding are essential tools for the future bank.